Musical Scales/Transcript
Transcript Sheet music is shown as a backdrop. Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim and Moby. Tim holds a keytar and presses some of the keys with one finger. Next to him, Moby frowns. Tim is playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but he repeatedly presses the wrong key when attempting to play the eighth note. TIM: Agh! Moby seizes the keytar and repeatedly presses the correct eighth note. MOBY: Beep! TIM: Well, maybe I was just trying to put my own spin on it. Two paintings are shown hung on a wall: one of Beethoven and one of a drummer. Tim holds up a typed letter and reads from it. TIM: Dear Tim and Moby, Can you do a movie on music scales? Thanks! From, Erin. You're welcome. In Western music, a scale is just a sequence of tones arranged in progressively higher pitches. Most of the music you're familiar with is based on diatonic scales. A diatonic scale contains eight notes. An image shows eight notes written on a musical staff, which is made up of five horizontal lines. The notes ascend from left to right and are placed either on a line or between two lines. This placement alternates. They are labeled, from left to right, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. Under these notes, a keyboard appears, and a finger presses all of the visible white keys in order from left to right to produce a diatonic scale. TIM: This is a C major scale. Like all scales, it’s named after its first note, or root, C. So actually, there are seven unique notes in every eight-note scale. Although each note has an unchanging letter name—like A, B, or C—the notes in a diatonic scale are also known as do, re, mi, fa, so, la, and ti. Regardless of what scale you’re playing, the root note is always known as do, the second note up is re, and so on. The letters of the notes disappear. Each note is then highlighted as Tim names it, and its name appears underneath it. MOBY: Beep? TIM: Well, that’s a little trickier. The diatonic scale is actually just one of a number of scale types—other scales have different numbers of notes and different patterns. MOBY: Beep? TIM: I’m getting there, okay? There is another kind of scale that you’ll want to know about if you’re learning music—the chromatic scale. A chromatic scale is similar to a diatonic scale—it starts with a specific note and ends when you reach an octave of that note. But instead of playing a pattern of notes with some whole-step intervals and some half-step intervals, you play every half step along the way. The beginning and ending notes of the C major scale are shown on a musical staff. Next, the remaining notes in the scale appear. Then the notes spread out so that only the first five remain on the staff. Notes with sharp signs (which look like number signs) to their left appear between these notes. This scale is played, with the camera moving to the right over the staff to show all the notes. MOBY: Beep. TIM: One of the main things that contributes to how a particular scale sounds is the musical distance, or interval, between each note. In Western music, the smallest interval is the half step. On a keyboard, a half step is the interval between any two adjacent keys. A labeled chromatic sequence from C to G# on a staff is shown above a keyboard. A finger presses the white key for C and then the black key to the right for C#. TIM: On the C Major scale, the interval between the root note and second note is two half steps, or one whole step. A labeled C major diatonic scale is shown above the keyboard. A finger presses the white key for C and then the white key for D. There is one black key between them. TIM: The distance between the third and fourth notes in the scale is just one half step up. The finger presses two adjacent white keys in ascending order, E and F. TIM: The pattern of intervals in the C major scale is the same for all diatonic scales. On the keyboard, curved lines connect each white key. The curves that fall over black keys are labeled “2,” and the curves that fall over two adjacent white keys are labeled “1.” MOBY: Beep. TIM: Okay, yeah, let’s—let’s talk about major and minor. If we wanted to play, say, the diatonic F Major scale, we’d use the same pattern of intervals as the C major scale but start on the F note instead of the C. A labeled F major diatonic scale is shown on a staff above a keyboard. The notes are, from left to right, F, G, A, B♭, C, D, E, F. A finger plays this scale on the keyboard. TIM: So...did you notice something similar about the way the F and C major scales sound? MOBY: Beep. TIM: Well, if you listen closely, you may notice that they’re both kind of cheery sounding! Compare the way they sound to this. A labeled written scale on a staff is shown above a keyboard. The notes in the scale are C, D, E♭, F, G, A♭, B♭, C. A finger plays this scale on the keyboard. Curved lines connect each note that is played, and labels appear above each curve: 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2. TIM: That’s a C minor scale. Minor scales are darker and more depressing than major scales. That’s why songs written in minor keys can seem mysterious or gloomy. A darkened sheet of music is shown on the left side of the screen, while a brightened sheet of music is shown on the right. MOBY: Beep? TIM: Well, say a song is written in the key of C Minor; that means it's based around the C Minor scale. So most of the notes in the song will come from that scale, and that song will take on the character of the scale. That song I was playing, the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, is in C Minor. You can hear how the darkness of the scale affects the mood of the tone. Tim attempts to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the keytar again. He falters again on the eighth note and starts pressing keys at random in an attempt to locate it. Moby frowns and covers his face with a hand in exasperation. Category:BrainPOP Transcripts Category:BrainPOP Arts & Music Transcripts